Moving on

There are moments in life when you just know that it is time to move on. It´s as if, things are moving along they way they should and then, "wham!" the realization hits you, you need to go. I think that´s what happened to John and I last week.

It was Friday, when we piled into Edwin´s blue Mazda pick-up, two mountain bikes and four 100 pound bags of compost and headed out of Ibarra. There were only two bikes and three of us, because apparently I would not need a bike, though the exact reason why eluded me. I speculated then that it might have been what was lacking between my legs in Edwin´s opinion, but that had yet to be confirmed. I mentioned, as we squeezed into the front of the cab, that I too would like to ride a bike, but Edwin just laughed and replied, "Let´s go," in an accented English, one of his fou English phrases (along with Please, Come on, I´m sorry and Thank you).

We were back in Ibarra somewhat anticlimactically as our volunteer job in La Chimba had been unexpectedly cancelled or postponed (which we weren´t sure), due to an impromptu training by the department of education. I couldn´t quite figure out why the training hadn´t come up as a problem before, but I imagine that part of the lack of success in the educational system in Ecuador might have something to do with this type of lack of communication. Call me crazy - it´s just a theory. Then again, I could have been just really disappointed about the possible cancellation of our volunteerism. . .

We had a few days free and Edwin, our bakery friend, insisted we stay with him and pay for our meals, which seemed just fine to us. Thursday, he had suggested that we head up to a small mountain village where he had grown up until age 13, when he had finshed school and had left home on a horse with, no money, no plan and nowhere to stay in Ibarra. Apparently his family lived on a tomato tree farm and that piqued our interest and we had the time, so we thought why not?

It was somewhere on that journey heading north out of Ibarra, as the asphalt turned first to a smooth octagonal type of cobblestone, then to a bumpier version of the same, the road seeming to be paved with any old rock or stone that had been found in the surrounding fields to finally dirt, the road strewn with rocks and debris, that I understood that it was essentially impossible to have anything but a 4 wheel drive vehicle. Of course, in the spirit of proving me wrong, not long after I had come to that conclusion, I saw the first of many buses winding their way deep into the valley on a road barely wide enough for it to pass. I wondered briefly how oncoming traffic fared in these situations, and then hoped I would never have to find that out.

The 46 kilometer ride from Ibarra, to where vehicles could no longer pass, due to a landslide that had obscured the road making it impossible to continue the last three kilometers up to the village, took us well over three hours, crossing bridges that had no business calling itself a bridge, and winding up and down mountain passes that made me glad I couldn´t see over the no-guard rail drop off from my seat in the middle of the cab.

After about two and a half hours, Edwin pulled the truck over, hopped out of the car, looked at me and asked, ¨You know how to drive?" I nodded not completely understanding why he needed to know. "Come on, John. Jenny can drive and we can bike." This was just too much. Not only was I not going to get to bike, but in addition, I had to drive these insane roads? I tried to protest, but Edwin pretended he hadn´t heard me and was already on the bike heading downhill, "Keep it in second," he shouted back at me, "otherwise you might careen off the side."

"Great, just fantastic." I mumbled, my heart beating in my throat. I definitely had to figure out a way to get out of driving tomorrow. Now I understood that this was just practice for the bike trip he had planned with John and two of his friends for Saturaday. No way in hell that I was going to spend the whole day in the car, while Edwin, John and his friends biked the whole way from Ibarra back up to this mountain village. Machismo or no, he was out of his mind. He didn´t know who he was messing with.

For the moment though, I drove. Slowly, much slower than John and Edwin, careening down the dirt roads, miles from medical services, helmets a precaution apparently not needed in this part of the country.

Somehow though, we made it intact, to where the road began to climb back up the hill and since Edwin was definitely not a biker, he called their trip quits before John could embarass him and threw his bike in the back of the truck, following it up there and sitting on the side of the bed. He motioned to John to follow and said something John clearly could not understand, ¨You keep driving Jenny, you´re not half bad.¨John, not totally understanding that I had just been insulted, shrugged and jumped in the back after Edwin. I put the car in first, put the idea out of my head to throw Edwin from the truck bed with a short stop, and continued driving, up the pass, back down the other side, over a few more ragged bridges, around tight corners, through a river and up the valley till we reached the slide.

"A truck will come down and meet us in a while. They know we´re coming." Edwin explained as we surveyed our surroundings. Mountains reached up on every side of us into a deep blue sky, dotted with white puffy clouds. Down below, the river raged over rocks in deep in a lush green valley. Flowers seemed to bloom in the most unlikely of places, yellow, purple and orange popping up out of rocks, dirt and trees alike.

"How long has the road been like this"? I wondered, thinking of how difficult the community´s life must be without any access to a town of any size.

"Maybe three months or so." Edwin shrugged, "Hope they get it fixed by the new year. Otherwise I´ll be stuck meeting my brother up here and loading up the truck with thousands and thousands of tomatoes to sell in town. I stared at the unmoving yellow crane on the far side of the slide, no one was working on the road. It looked like no one had worked on it in months. It was little more than a large pile of dirt obscuring one side from the other.

By then, Edwin´s half-brother, Julio had arrived in another pick up, dressed in knee high, black rubber boots, dirty jeans and a black t-shirt. We dragged the bikes and the four 100 pound bags of compost over the fallen road, past the motionless tractor to Julio´s red pick up (And by we, I mean John, Julio and Edwin, apparently that too was no job for a female).

At Edwin´s mother´s house, we ducked to enter the kitchen and sat on low, wooden stools at a small wooden table, pushed up against the far wall. The wall was barren with the exception of a calendar, the picture on this month´s page, a toddler in a raccoon suit. I surveyed my surroundings. Julio sat on a milk crate against the far wall, close to a door that led out to a small store. Edwin´s mother began serving us fresh tomato juice, fresh from their tomato trees, laden with tons of sugar and local water, followed by a quinoa and potato soup. We were assured that no hens had been sacrificed for our visit, but I felt uneasy, as I sipped the familiar broth. Edwin´s mother looked on as I searched my bowl, laughing as she sat on a bag of potatoes beside the oven, "Eat! It´s good for you." When I inquired if she would join us in eating, she laughed again, "Later I eat. After you young people."

Immediately following our meal of the psuedo chicken soup, rice, potatoes and salad fresh from their fields, we bid good bye to his mother, who immediately began, no not to eat, but to clean the dishes. I offered to clean the dishes myself, as a thank you for having fed us, but was laughed right out of the small concrete house, back out onto the dirt road and the hot, afternoon sun.

Edwin indicated to John that he follow on the bike and so John followed, apologizing to me with his eyes as he left me to walk down the steep side of the pasture to visit the tomato trees with Julio. I still didn´t get how a tomato could grow on a tree, but I had a feeling I was about to find out.

We climbed down the grassy hill to a grove of trees with large, floppy dark green leaves and a skinny trunk, similar to bamboo and there they were, hundreds of thousands of tomato trees.

We wandered through rows and rows of the lush trees, heavy with the unripe fruit. Edwin found two almost red ones, plucked them from the tree and handed them to John and me, "Tomatoes, fresh from the tree." On the far side of the field, where the trees were little more than two feet tall, a young man with a whip made of some sort of vine, followed a white horse in the rows between the baby plants. The horse, harnished with a makeshift plow, a curved wooden tree trunk with a carved wooden wedge, tilled the soil as they walked by us. This indeed was a different life. We stood there observing the fields for a few minutes and waved at the man working the field as he came by us on his way back down the row.

From tomato trees, to bean plants to fields of asparagus, each one worked by only one or two men, dressed alike in their knee high rubber boots, worn jeans and t-shirts, wide brim hats atop their dark hair to ward off the strong sun. "How long does it take to plow a field like this?" I inquired in Spanish after John asked me the same question in English.

"About four days to plow the two acres, harvest is a whole other story. Maybe two or three weeks if we´re fast and lucky."

"Problem is, there aren´t too many young people left here," explained Julio as we walked together, John and Edwin, mere specs of color on their bicycles. "We only have about 50 families to begin with and lots of times, once the kids finish school, at 12 or 13, they head to the city. See if they can´t find work, make money. You know?"

"Is there a school here in town?" I wondered aloud.

"Sure," he nodded, " Passed up by the house. ´Bout 30 kids go there from grades one through six, two teachers. One for kinder and one for the rest."

We walked in silence then. So much and yet nothing else to say. I had a million questions for Julio, but didn´t want to offend with my naive curiousity. Perhaps he has a million for me as well, but the same reasons stopped him.

We reached the makeshift fence at the far end of the field and I climbed between the top and bottom rung after Julio, then waited while he replaced the missing middle one. "It´s not a fancy gate, but it works." He said gesturing behind him at the gate we had just come through. I smiled and nodded, it sure did.

Luckily for Edwin, though not so much for John, John had a relapse of the stomach virus that had plagued him the week before in Bahía de Caraquez, and so Edwin was spared my "Don´t be a sexist asshole rant!" when I was sure to be refused a bicycle for the following day´s adventure.

As John lay suffering in bed, the La Chimba job now definitely cancelled, the Galapagos job postponed till January, the jungle job now the first week in February, we thought about what to do. Edwin was a stellar guy. He had given us his house, fed us, guided us all over the area, but he had a serious, machista blind spot. One that was making me, (and despite his illness, John) extremely uncomfortable.

So, we did what we had to do. We bid out good byes and moved on. Yes, we waited for John to recover, but the minute he did, we bid Edwin and his family good bye and began the trek southward toward Boliva.

Of course, as with all of the best laid plans of mice and men, our plans changed and we got waylayed in Peru, which is where we are now. Somehow, on the three bus rides totalling more than 50 hours from Quito to the Bolivian border, we made new Limeño friends, who had other ideas for us. So after a quick stop in Lima and a snack and shower at Oscar´s house (one of our newfound friends), we headed to the Peruvian side of Lake Titicaca, so that John could also partake in some of the beauty that Peru has to offer. I imagine Bolivia and Argentina are not going anywhere, even if our time is.